Radiance of the Ridiculed

The Gospel of St. Mark records this scene in harsher tones:

Do you hear the tone of these voices? The sarcasm? The insolence? In American school-yard slang, one would say, "You idiot! ...."

Shocking. For only a few verses earlier, Jesus was equated to God (Lu 8:39), as we discussed last week. And a few verse before that, the Disciples had cried out,

Do you think that I have the tone wrong? Then, read down a few lines:

They ridiculed Him! This is no mere sacrasm, but outright derision and contempt. The Greek word we find at Luke 8:53 is κατεγέλων / kategélon which means to "laugh at, to mock."

What is this variability of the human spirit that causes the Disciples to behave in this way, which might cause us to stray from reverence into a heady arrogance at times? One minute, we are firmly rooted in devout life: humble, filled with awe before the Living God, saying our prayers, and striving always to live a life that is acceptable to Him. Yet, the next moment, we stray into attitudes, thoughts, and states of mind that cause angels to flee!

Certainly, these are not passions on display. For our passions are regulated by our frame of mind. Giddiness does not come into raucous bloom out of a sincere and venerating spirit. Once we know the reality of God, of His hearing and seeing our every thought and deed, there are only two things that permit us to behave in this way.

The first is captured in the proverb, "Familiarity breeds contempt," seen in many families. Without question God is our Father. This is bedrock Gospel teaching, and our own experiences bear this truth out: God's long-suffering patience, His unconditional love, His forgiveness. Are not these things found alone in one's mother and father?

But if we believe that family intimacy grants us permission to act out, then surely we have strayed. Fear of the Lord — awe, honor, and reverence, — is the beginning of wisdom. Certainly, teenage insolence toward mother and father or abuse of sister and brother is no basis for family love in any case. Most certainly, God does not ever abdicate His Fatherly dignity. His tenderness can never be a kind of foolishness.

Also seen in families is the selfish presumption of forgiveness or tolerance. If we believe that God forgives our unrepentant, grave sins or that He tolerates a double life on account of His famous mercy, then we have failed to grasp forgiveness. Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive one who sins against him? When Jesus replies, "seventy times seven" (meaning indefinitely), He follows up by explicating this principle with the Parable of the King Who Wanted to Settle Accounts. The servant who pleads for mercy, asking forgiveness with a contrite heart, this one the king will forgive even to the extent of ten thousand talents (in today's money 10,000 times $12.6 trillion dollars), meaning, obviously, "without limit." But the one who is not truly contrite, who has no trace of compassion in his soul, that one the king hands over to torturers .... that is, to Hades.

And does one measure contrition? Surely, the one who returns to his or her sin over and over again can never be termed contrite. And the priest who freely administers absolution over such a man (or woman) is no friend of God ..... nor a friend, finally, to the penitent, who falls ever more deeply into living death unto eternal death. Yes, God is merciful, but (to quote C.S. Lewis), He is not a senile old grandfather with a great white beard who just wants everyone to be happy.

If we should believe that God would suspend the moral law because He "understands" our so-called "needs," then we are living in a trance and ought to recognize this for what it is: a sign of demonic possession. For such thoughts could never come to a godly person. Or if they should drift in, a godly mind would reject them out hand as the work of the devil. Only one who has permitted possession to take root could entertain such notions. In its advanced stages, one lives a fully developed, carefully hidden double life. And it all has proceeded from delusions of grandeur: supposing that God has singled us out to suspend His own values and moral laws .... (just for us, you see). This is nothing less than Satan's sin: overweening pride and towering egotism.

Am I going too far? Then I invite you to look out on a world in which demons now run rampant. In the case of believers, of self-indulgent Christians, how else could the mind and spirit accept a secret life and then live it every day? Yet, they have, and they do. Consider the so-called churches which have become indistinguishable from profane culture. Consider so-called priests who habituate sexual perversion (the majority according to our best statistics). Consider so-called bishops who are also "in it," who therefore must resist meaningful reform. (You have heard the anecdotes: the priest says, "I am not going down alone, Bishop!") The field of victory belongs to the evil one, and everywhere he exults in his triumph.

We asked last week, "What must a man do to lay open his mind and soul to an infestation of 6,000 demons?" We know the answer. He must open his computer to pornography. He must open his daily routine to happy hour and beyond. He must open his drug stash "to unwind." He must open his arms to women who are not his wife. In sum, he must consent to a free-fall into pleasure-seeking. His mind is never far from the next excitement. And dopamine has become his God.

Before long, his life is little more than a succession of video streams playing in his head, for his unwholesome thoughtworld has become his lifeworld. Such people ask, "What if there is no God?" or "You only go around once!"

Our historical period is the era that has banished God. Or, better said, our era has brought to full culmination trends that began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (so-called), gathered strength during the nineteenth-century especially with Darwin, and then swept over the entire culture during the 1960s and later. You know the timeline: birth control pills become generally available commencing the era of promiscuity (1960); prayer is banned from public schools (1962); full-frontal nudity appears in mainstream magazines everywhere (1972); the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Child Pornograpy Prevention of Act of 1996 (2002). I could go on, but who does not see the hell around us, where even the protection of children is no longer deemed a compelling public interest?

I have told the story of "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Huxley, who was an early apologist for the theory of evolution. Huxley was asked why the technical journal publishing Charles Darwin's landmark article (1859) sold out when it had never done so before?

"Don't you know?!" Huxley asked the journalists archly. "It sold out because the word went round that Darwin had gotten rid of God!" Now, here was a tantalizing thought for the pleasure-seeker. "What?! No God?! Then what is to stop me from doing whatever I want?" The answer of course is, "Nothing." For without God there can be no moral life. And the idea that everyone has their own truth quickly devolves into a free-for-all.

If we have any moral code at all, it is "Live and let live" and "Don't judge me," which has opened the way to pornography in every household, incurable STDs in every family, legalization of ruinous drugs, and new "liberation movements" appearing every year.

As we considered last week, syphilis has risen 1000% in the past ten years, about half arising from men having sex with men. The ninth leading cause of injury in the U.S. today is foreign objects (mostly sexual) lodged in certain cavities of the body, according to the CDC. 40% of all Americans are medically obese. And 46.3 million American are drug addicts according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The compulsion to be rid of godly life was apparent in Darwin's lifetime. Before the advent of street lights (which would come a generation later), every kind of sex act could be seen in the alleys and sidewalks of London. So common was this nightly grotesquery, with its adjunct of robbery, murder, and epidemic disease, that for the first time in London's nearly two-thousand year history, a general police force was established called "Scotland Yard." Constables were styled "Bobbies," named for Sir Robert Peel, the Christian reformer who had advocated for this Metropolitan Police. But the real "founder" were the wives of noblemen diagnosed with syphilis, which in the mid-ninteenth century, was a slow, painful, and disfiguring sentence of death.

The linkage between the rejection of God and epidemic syphilis began in England during the period known as the Enlightenment. A universal call went up in the West to replace God with human reason with a statue of reason erected in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

In the same era, our own Founding Fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al. derided the idea of a God who could hear our prayers. "Childish!" they said. And they thought the Divinity of Jesus Christ to be a fairy tale. Needless to say, the concept of a Higher Power holding them accountable for their thoughts and actions was ludicrous to their way of thinking.

"Wait a minute!" you might say. Isn't God mentioned in many places in our founding documents?" Yes, to be sure, the Name of God is invoked in many places. But such language was conventional, for the common people mostly did believe in God striving to live by God's statutes. Benjamin Franklin wrote that widespread piety was essential if the young republic had any hope of survival. How else could any government hope to restrain the libertine impulses of its population?

Meantime, in his private letters Franklin, himself (a notorious libertine), counseled young men in the art of amourous life. In a widely circulated open letter, he commended older women as the ideal partner for sexual adventures:

His letter goes into both psychological and carnal detail. But of greater interest is his premise that willing "old women" are in abundance and eager to please. At no time does he use the term widow or spinster, for adultury might be fine for keeping good order among the masses, but for worldly and cultured men, such moral scruples were among the artifacts of the Old World to be rejected out of hand. Indeed, both Jefferson and Franklin founded universities (University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania) ordaining that nothing of the past be studied save the history of tyranny. Franklin on his death bed continued to inveigh against the study of Latin and Greek at his academy. The founders of Harvard considered scrapping the English language altogether, for it was hopelessly embedded with the artifacts of Old World culture and values. Founders of the American republic were committed to the new. As inheritors of empiricism, they believed that little of the past was worth preserving, much less teaching.

Do you see what I am saying? They saw a world in which the true and the worthy lay all before them, while behind them was a train of valueless trash.

So you see, rejection of the past — past categories, past beliefs, past morality, and certainly religion — is deeply rooted in the American mind. The many rejections we see around us today are only the latest expression of fundamental American ideals. Recall that the First Amendment of our Constitution is that the government establish no religion.

Meantime, God is God. He does not read Benjamin Franklin. He is not moved by America's founding documents. He does not rely on the viccissitudes of belief today. Nor does He wait upon the wandering minds of the present generation. He simply Is ..... in His Almighty Silence. To quote Elijah, He is not in the blasting wind; He is not in the earthquake; He is not in the conflagration; His is a still, small voice (1 Kings 19:11-12).

And in the midst of ridicule and surrounded by derision and held up to contempt, God is serenely God. To the faithful old matron, He extends His healing hand. To the young and innocent girl whose corpse lies motionless, He gently extends the finger and spark of life. And the many restless spirits all about Him, both demonic and human? To these He pays no mind.

For His is holy ground detected only through souls that have been purified. We remove our sandals in silence. We ignore the bedlam and filth in the distance. We gaze intently as upon holy fire with eyes that can see and listen with ears that can hear. And in the midst of this Holy Love, He reveals His Name: "I AM Who I AM."

We who are former Franciscans at the Hermitage call to mind the words of the Western saint, Anthony of Padua: "We are what we are before God and nothing more." This is our highest aspiration: for "What we are" to become indistinguishable from His "I AM." We desire nothing else. We seek approval from no one else .... only to be One with Him as He is One with the Father (Jn 17:21).

Pay no attention, He says, to demeaning voices (Mt 10:14). Give a wide berth to persecuters (Mk 6:11). But say your prayers. Wash your face. Anoint your head. And present a cheerful spirit to the world (Mt 6:17). That is all. For nothing will redeem the lives round us more certainly than this. As St. Seraphim of Sarov taught,

In time yours will become the face of radiance. Your spirit will be sought as a refuge from the fevered world. For such is the Kingdom of Heaven: living stones, one by one, built unto a spiritual house as we heard in our Epistle lesson this morning.

To be sure, the world beyond is daunting and dark (1 Jn 1:15). But the freedom beneath Heaven's skies has no end. And the Light under God's ever-present gaze is Life itself (Jn 1:1ff), empowering us to become the sons and daughters of God ....